Tag Archives: MinGW

“Hello World” Cross-Compiling

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I recently switched to work on a Linux environment, in a project where most of the potential users will be using Windows.
Theoretically that is not a problem, since I am sticking to standard C++, and a few other libraries that are fully cross-platform (e.g.: Qt[1], Boost[1])
Of course in practice, things are always slightly more complicated 🙂

Since my original project was created in Windows, using the nmake compiler, I still have a functional environment that I can use. However this solution requires me to:

  1. start Windows;
  2. checkout the latest source code;
  3. tweak the configuration for the Windows environment;

It is mainly 1. and 3. that bother me; I don’t start Windows that often, and there are quite a few things to tweak, when you change from GNU g++ to MS nmake[3].

There are many options to make things a bit “smoother”, and one of them would be to change the compiler to Jom[4] or MinGW, so that it could be use in both OS, with minimal tweaks. Another option would be to create a repository only for the source code, and leave the configuration files unchanged, both in Windows in Linux. These are all things that I want to explore, but for the moment I ceased to my “fascination” with cross-compiling, and decided to investigate it a bit further. Wouldn’t it be so cool to be able to generate a Windows binary, straight from Linux? It seems like the perfect option, if it was that easy!

To get a functional cross-compiling environment, you basically will need Wine[5] and MinGW[6]. In a nutshell, Wine is a is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems; the acronym says everything: “Wine Is Not an Emulator”. MinGW is a minimalist development environment for native Microsoft Windows applications. Installing these software in Ubuntu, is as easy as:

sudo apt-get install wine mingw32 mingw32-binutils mingw32-runtime

This should be it; so I started with a simple example that I grabbed from [7]:

#include 

int APIENTRY WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance,
    LPSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow)
{
  MessageBox(NULL,
    "Cette fenêtre prouve que le cross-compilateur est fonctionnel !",
    "Hello World", MB_OK);
  return 0;
}

I compiled it like this, using MingGW:

i586-mingw32msvc-g++ -o essai.exe essai.cpp

To execute the binary, you will need the mingw library: mingwm10.dll, that can be copied like this to the current directory:

gunzip -c /usr/share/doc/mingw32-runtime/mingwm10.dll.gz > mingwm10.dll

Then the application can be launched with:

wine essai.execute

hello2

References:
[1] http://qt-project.org/
[2] http://www.boost.org/
[3] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd9y37ha.aspx
[4] http://qt-project.org/wiki/jom
[5] http://www.winehq.org/
[6] http://mingw.org/
[7] http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Ubuntu_cross_compilation_for_Windows

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